Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

by David Connor

  “His last name’s Webber. And I compete with him all the time—and kick his ass.”

  “Not when it comes to his looks.”

  Ouch.

  “At the same time, it’s not like you’re ugly.”

  “Good to know.”

  “It would be better if you were darker… or lighter…. People might not know what to call you.”

  I came up with several things to call her. She was pushing all the wrong buttons.

  “With some work, you could look like the third Hemsworth brother,” Media Lady said, “with nappy hair, of course.”

  It had sprouted in as short black corkscrews on my head and not much different on my body. “Um… there’s already three Hemsworth brothers,” I told her.

  “I’ll include the real third one when he does something worthy.”

  Her name was Claudia—not Claw-dia, like on the end of a cat’s paw, but Cloud-ia, like in the sky. She’d told me that when I’d said it wrong. She mentioned my eyes every few minutes and told me no less than eleven more times not to bring up the word gay. Paid by the hour I presumed, she seemed to figure she may as well hang around awhile, even if it meant repeating herself. Her diamonds and designer skirt looked awfully out of place in a small locker room office that smelled of metal from a huge desk, a couple of chairs, and a filing cabinet. The aroma of the shower room down the hall also wafted in now and again. Though I preferred it to her perfume, she probably didn’t. We must have been paying her big bucks to make it worth her while to smell it.

  “Let the men drool over you, but let’s not disappoint the ladies. There isn’t much going on for a while between now and summer. We’ll have to keep your name in the news, though, so people don’t forget who you’re gunning for.”

  “How?”

  “That’s for me to worry about.”

  “You just swim,” Coach Keller said.

  “So if asked about my sexuality, I should lie?” I went back to that a lot, as it was one of several things I obsessed about when not in the water.

  “If you screw men—and don’t tell me if you do—then pretty much, yes. Like I said, that market has been cornered, and don’t fool yourself. America may have voted a black man and soon a woman into the presidency, but the ones who didn’t vote that way and some who did are not ready for a gay Olympic swimming champ. For every homo beating off to your ex-training partner in his Speedo, there are a dozen people disgusted. Some of those people might matter to your future, so just stay out of that end of the pool.”

  I hardly thought about Mathias at all anymore, except when I couldn’t stop. His occasional calls, texts, and e-mails had finally slowed to nothing. I’d ignored them all, waiting for a two-word subject line that never came—“I’m sorry.” Claudia was spot-on with her take on Mathias. He’d become quite the gay icon since revealing his sexuality back in August. I’d stumbled across no less than a dozen Tumblr pages dedicated to him. While I’d failed at a threesome, I’d beat off to photographic proof of him taking part in a gay orgy with Sonny, Will, and Paul from Days of Our Lives, and Brad, Lucas, and Felix from General Hospital. Sure, it was on GayFakeFuck.com, but it was still pretty hot, and proved Mathias was already famous enough to be fake-fucking soap opera characters no longer fucking on screen. It seemed 2016 was not only an election year, a leap year, and an Olympic year, it was also the year soap operas took a step backward, getting rid of or not showing prominent gay couples and characters once featured regularly. General Hospital had all but abandoned a Brucas romance as well—Brucas being the couple name given to the on-air gay pair early on.

  Cloud-ia was also right about the negativity. If I went looking, hateful comments about Mathias weren’t hard at all to find.

  Keep the fags out of the pool.

  Russia has it right, no homos at The Games.

  Maybe he’ll get AIDS like the last one.

  It had me wondering if the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling in 2015 scared the haters out of the closet in forces strong enough to change things on daytime TV. Soap opera characters can’t be gay. Politicians can’t be gay. Swimmers can’t be gay. I didn’t want to be part of that cultural regression.

  “I won’t lie,” I said.

  “Then play coy. No one is going to ask unless you give them reason.”

  “In other words, butch it up?”

  “Reed.” Coach Keller tried to shush me.

  “Yes,” Cloud-ia said. “We’ll circulate some pictures of you with women. Do you know any?”

  “I have a sister.”

  “Reed.”

  “And anytime Mathias Webber comes up, something like ‘he’s a good swimmer’ will suffice. Give short, simple answers.”

  I wanted to call her Clown-ia. “You just spent forty-five minutes telling me how to make my answers longer.” It wasn’t as if reporters were knocking down my door. Hell, I’d scoured fifty gay blogs before I came across a picture of myself half-naked and dripping wet, and that was in the background in one of Mathias’s. I guess my celebrity status was expected to rise. Maybe I’d at least get fake-fucked soon, seeing as I still wasn’t getting fucked for real.

  “Which is it?” I asked. “Long or short? Make up my mind.”

  “Reed.” Coach Keller offered another one-syllable scolding.

  “The best thing to do would be to veer the conversation in another direction. That may be a little advanced, but by the time you get to Rio, perhaps we can train you better.”

  “Train me? What am I, a fucking circus elephant?”

  “Reed!”

  I could definitely give Mathias a run for his bratty money when I put my mind to it. I missed my family that day. I’d rarely gotten home once my final semester had started, and hadn’t been there overnight since New Year’s, when I’d seen my first vagina up close and personal. Plus, I’d had one hell of a long day after a freshman started a fire in his dorm. Once that had been dealt with, I’d spent hours rewriting an entire paper for Sociology.

  “Your views cannot be this shallow,” the professor had scrawled across the top of the draft I’d turned in. A piss-poor couple hours of sleep had followed, and my fuse was short. I tried to decide after my snarky outburst whether my father would be disappointed in my disrespect or proud of me for calling bullshit when I saw it. Either way, Cloud-ia smiled.

  “Your cockiness adds to your appeal. Maybe you can be a rebel heartthrob. I wonder if we should fix the tooth.”

  “That’s it.” I stood, but Coach shoved me right back down.

  We somehow managed to squeeze one more person into the room when a rather robust older man with ten hairs plastered to the top of his scalp with some sort of gel showed up. He was introduced to me as Mick Albert, my new sports agent, and all I could think of when I looked at him was “Show me the money!” I imagined the pool filled with it instead of water, and Mick and Cloud-ia were dipping in with huge buckets.

  “How much does he make?” I asked Coach Keller.

  “Depends on what you make,” Albert answered. “I’m expecting it’ll be a lot.”

  “Don’t pressure him.” Coach Keller started massaging my shoulders.

  “Ow.”

  He stopped.

  “Do I even need an agent yet? I’m not famous.”

  “You’re going to be,” Cloud-ia said.

  “Video of you topping the golden boy’s times has gone viral,” Coach told me.

  “Huh?”

  “Somehow the footage got out.” Mick winked. I shuddered. “People are talking about you, expecting you to win big. You do well at the Olympic trials—”

  “Oh. He will,” Coach said.

  “We are going to get you a commercial.” My agent needed dental work too.

  “The swimming always comes first,” Coach Keller reminded me.

  But I lit right up for the first time all day. “I had this idea, right? My brother’s a Special Olympian. He’s going to a national meet this year—swimming, just like me. I thought it wo
uld be cool if we could maybe do some sort of campaign together. You think you can arrange something like that?”

  Wide Tie and High Heels exchanged glances. “We’re not sure that’s the sort of image we’re looking to put out there,” Albert said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m imagining you more advertising high-end menswear or maybe cologne. Luxury products,” Mick Albert said. “Your unique look… your brand of unsophisticated, unconventional beauty, the incongruent aspect of you and something couture and upscale, that’s the goal.”

  I stared at him stunned. Then turned toward the mirror in the office and wondered if he was calling me ugly, despite Clown-ia’s claim that I wasn’t. “My brother,” I began, refocusing on Agent Albert, “works his ass off every day—with a smile on his face—to do schoolwork, his chores, and then he gives everything he has left in the pool.”

  “Reed.”

  I ignored my coach’s reproach. “But what? You think his alleged disability would turn consumers off?” I stood again, refusing this time to be forced back to my seat. “By the way, he’s all the way black. No one ever mistakes him for anything else. Just putting that out there in case it’s a problem for the McMuffin- or Whopper-buying public, because I’m telling you this: you really think you can make some money off me? Find someone interested in the kind of ad I want to do, or there won’t be any commercials at all.” The folding metal chair clanged against the desk when I kicked it. “I hate this stuff, Coach. I’m going home.”

  “Home where? Your day’s not over,” he shot back.

  “Maybe the whole thing is over.” I had never defied him before, unless I counted almost having sex. “Maybe I quit.”

  I slammed out the door, got in my used 2008 Ford Focus, and drove all the way to Dover, close to a hundred miles in almost two hours. My phone rang a dozen times. I ignored it. Once or twice, I thought Coach Keller was behind me in his truck. He wasn’t.

  The first thing I did when I got in the door back home was hug my mother. My dad was at work. Otherwise, I would have hugged him too.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “We didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I quit,” I said.

  “Reed….” She said it as if I had just claimed the sky was neon orange or some such silly thing.

  “I mean it. If I can’t be myself, what’s the point?”

  “Who says you can’t be yourself?”

  “My media lady, Cloud-ia. That’s her name…. Cloud… dia, like she’s some sort of frigging weather phenomena. ‘El Niño will bring warmer temps and cloud-ia over the entire nation.’ Don’t laugh at me!” I said when my mother did.

  “It was funny. You’re funny.”

  “Tell them that. They think I don’t look good or talk good.”

  “Reed!” Devon ran down the stairs and threw his hefty weight against me, pushing me back against the fridge door. “Why are you home?”

  “I….” I couldn’t say it. “I needed a break.”

  “Not me. I’m working hard.”

  “I know you are. I’m so proud.” I kissed his forehead. “I’m fixin’ to get right back at it tomorrow.”

  “Did Mathias come?”

  He asked me that every damned time, even though I’d told him over and over Mathias and I were not a couple—even friends anymore—and never would be. It may have been part of the disability. Once my brother got a certain notion in his head, there was no changing it. “No. He didn’t.”

  Devon grunted, then pouted.

  “Someday there will be someone else,” I told him. “Just not Mathias. Let’s go look at your medals.” He’d won a couple more since I’d last been home.

  “Why are you here again?”

  “Because.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Stop saying what Dad says.” I poked him and he laughed.

  A couple hours later, I finally called Coach Keller. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “I’ll leave here before four.”

  “Leave when you need to. Get a good night’s sleep. Take the whole weekend. We can miss a day.”

  “We can?”

  “There’s no point in training if your head is somewhere else.”

  It was. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” I called off work too. There was no sense in screwing any of that up, and then I took a long nap. I stumbled down the stairs a few minutes too late for dinner to find Dad with his head in the fridge. Apparently he’d gotten up from the table not quite full, or maybe he’d worked downstairs hard enough to be hungry again. I’d heard him clanging around in the basement a little while, different tones, like metal and porcelain.

  “You get it put in?” I asked.

  He turned. “Set into place. No water to it yet.”

  “Thanks again for not making me take it back.”

  Dad pulled out a plate wrapped in foil. “Hey, it’s not every day you get a toilet for Christmas—wrapped, no less.”

  “Dev helped.”

  “Helped me too. He’s looking forward to living down there.” Dad set down the plate and went for bread and ketchup. “He likes working with his hands. He’s good at it too—all of it. Best painter in the family.”

  I had an ocean fog flashback.

  “I hope we can find the right school for him after graduation… if he makes graduation… in case there’s something else he likes he doesn’t even know about yet.” Dad looked tired.

  “Cloverton has a precollege Special Ed department for high school juniors and seniors,” I told him. “Maybe we could get Dev tested. There’s a fee, of course, but maybe I can… get a discount, or something… help out… if you’ll let me.”

  My father was noncommittal with his silence.

  “What’d I miss?” I asked, trying to see what was on the plate.

  He uncovered it with a crinkly metallic magician’s flourish. “Meatloaf.”

  “Mmm. Is it cold yet?”

  “Perfect temperature for a sandwich.”

  We sat down. Dad made mine, then handed it over on a paper towel. I took a huge bite. “Oh my God!” I took another, before I’d swallowed the first.

  “Your mother wanted to wake you up. I told her a sandwich later would do.” Dad made himself one and then broke half off. “Here.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s not a doughnut. You can have it, right?” He pushed the plate over with the rest of the delectable brown rectangle glazed in bright red ketchup. “The rest?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I saw a certain swimmer on YouTube sitting down to fourteen pancakes, a dozen eggs, and a whole package of bacon.”

  “Uh-huh. Was there potatoes?”

  “Baked. We saved you three.” He got up and put them in the microwave for me. No one had done anything for me in, like, forever. It was good to be home, I thought, as I took a bite of sandwich and chased it with a hunk of meatloaf I’d chomped like an apple.

  “So… you’ll be seeing Mathias at the team qualifier in a few weeks.”

  “Dad….” What was his excuse, I wondered.

  “What? Don’t talk with my mouth full?”

  I said nothing.

  “Ohhh. Mathias.”

  “We haven’t been together since freshman year. That was a lifetime ago. I don’t get why everyone thinks he’s the one.”

  “We haven’t met anyone else, and his name does come up a lot when we talk.”

  “It does?”

  Dad shrugged. “In almost every conversation.”

  I wondered if that was true.

  “Is it possible a part of you still hopes it might work out? Even a tiny part?” He squinted and illustrated with his thumb and pointer finger.

  Something accepted as factual. You must tell this at all times.

  “I don’t know.” It was exasperating as hell. “I don’t want to.” It hurt me a little to say that. “Okay. Sometimes I do want to. And sometimes I think I still do. There. I said it. That’s the truth. B
ut what’s fantasy and what’s real, you know? He’s jerked me around way too many times, Dad.” I told him all of it, from Mathias wanting to be with other people to cure his loneliness, all the way up to when he stood me up in Russia, just as we were finally about to get back together. “If I’m so important to him, why did he let something else get in the way of us reconciling?”

  “Your mother and I broke up a hundred times before it finally stuck.”

  “For real?”

  “I told you that.”

  “Not a hundred times.”

  “Over just about the same timeframe as you and Mathias.” Dad brought over the potatoes, sat, and then popped right back up to fetch a plastic pitcher of sweet tea.

  “Over what?”

  “Stuff that seemed important one day and not so important the next.”

  “Be specific.”

  “I don’t know. I’d lose track of time working on the car and be late picking her up after work. I’d lose track of time working on the car and forget to go to work. She had a good point there.” I saw my father as the most responsible man on the planet, so I found what he was saying really hard to believe. “I was always forgetting something.” Dad took half of one of my three potatoes. “I wasn’t baked yet, your mother would say. Luckily, she gave me time to finish.” Dad’s enjoyable chewing noises were comical. “Let me throw this out there. You remember when you won the school spelling bee in fifth grade?”

  “And then tanked in the first round at the regional round? M-i-s-c-h-i-e-v-i-o-u-s. Mischiev-I-ous. I still say either spelling is allowed. Yeah. Vaguely.”

  “Okay. Forget spelling. The wounds are too fresh.” He smiled a ketchup-y grin. “When you first started swimming, you were good, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you better now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because I practiced.”

  “Worked at it, might you say?”

  “You forgot the glasses.”

  “Your legs broke? I brought the tea.”